Rupert Brooke

442 MICHAEL L. ROSS assume at all that the work is about England in the 1580s, the Arcadia cannot be a critique of absolutism because the England that had evolved since the Magna Carta, the England of the Tudor parliaments, is the reality to be dealtwith. Less or more power might be at issue, but absolute in the sense of unlimited monarchy surely is not. Sinfield's six ways in which the Arcadia manifests criticism against monarchy (p 398) are largely distortions and misreadings of the text, as are, I believe, his discussions ofPhilisides and Philanax. But texts are a convenience (or inconvenience) here; Sinfield's concern, he says, is 'to establish in principle the possibility of a structural position from which state ideology might be perceived critically' (p 405). The final section has two essays, Coburn Freer's 'The Style of Sidney's Psalms: which really is about Sidney's psalms, and G.F. Waller's " 'This Matching of Contraries": Calvinism and Courtly Philosophy in the Sidney Psalms: which is not (most of the discussion concerns Mary's translations). Waller, too, argues against a straw man. The only position he could be refuting is one that asserted Sidney was a thoroughgoing Calvinist with no other thoughts or impulses. As [ have said, [ think quarrels about selection are inevitable in this sort of enterprise. Kinney's book will be a useful addition to my Sidney shelf notwithstanding . Rupert Brooke MICHAEL L. ROSS Paul Delany. The NeD-Pagans: Rupert Brooke and the Ordeal of Youth Collier-Macmillan Canada. xviii, 270. $37.95 Paul Delany's study, according to its publisher, 'tells for the first time the full story' of Rupert Brooke and his circle. Delany himself claims that Christopher HassaU's 1964 biography 'gave a fundamentally distorted and incomplete view' of Brooke. Since Hassall's book is twice the length of Delany's and presents many more details of its subject's life, such claims might seem misplaced; Delany; however, has spotlighted those sides of Brooke's personality - his sexual quandaries, his anti-Semitism, his misogyny - which Hassall ignored or minimized . 'It was Rupert Brooke's true fate to die young: Delany begins; 'posterity added a false one, that he died innocent: Where Hassall could accept the popular estimate of Brooke as 'in some ways "the average nice young man,'" Delany effectively demolishes all but the last of the three adjectives. It is fair to add that Hassall himself, pace Delany, expresses serious reservations about the whitewashing of Brooke's memory. Delany tempers the myth of Brooke as the 'romantic individualist' by exploring his relations with a group of like-minded contemporaries, dubbed by Virginia Woolf the 'Neo-pagans: Besides Rupert Brooke, the central group included MONTREAL STORYTELLERS 443 Justin Brooke, Jacques Raverat, Gwen and Frances Darwin, Ka Cox, and the Olivier sisters. If such names do not now ring tumultuous bells, there are reasons. Delany cites a 1909 Brooke letter as a virtual 'Neo-pagan manifesto' - 'We'll be children seventy-years, instead of seven. We'll live Romance, not talk of it' - but the rebellion against Victorian restraints embarrassingly recalls the flutterings of Peter Pan. Comparing the Neo-pagans with the less unstable Bloomsbury Group, Delany attributes the Pagans' early dissolution largely to 'sexual dynamics' that prohibited easy friendship. His alternate explanation seems, however, more convincing: 'Part of their fragility as a group derived from simple inferiority of character and talent ... ; in the long run, they had less to build on.' The book's most attractive quality is the sceptical scrutiny which Delany levels not only at the Neo-pagans as a set but at Brooke as an individual. Of Brooke's 'picturesque exile in Grantchester,' three miles from Cambridge, he says: 'People who really want to be hermits should not take lodgings in a charming spot within anhour's stroll from scores ofacquaintances.' His commenton Brooke's affair with a Tahitian girl, Taatamata, rings true: 'Inevitably, he achieved his only real sensual happiness with a woman who was as far removed from his mother as it was possible to get.' Delany, who wrote the valuable earlier study D. H. lAwrence's Nightmare, traces some intriguing parallels between Brooke and...